


The Zoo

by velero (istia), velero



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, Not Canon Compliant, POV Stiles Stilinski
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-06 23:40:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17354843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/istia/pseuds/velero, https://archiveofourown.org/users/velero/pseuds/velero
Summary: Stiles grows up and learns to think for himself.





	The Zoo

He loved the zoo. Mom used to take him from when he was tiny; he could remember staring at the scary animals from the safety of her arms. They'd go regularly enough to track the changes in the habitat through the seasons.

At some point, he realized they were sad. Mom said they weren't sad, though, not really; they had everything they needed and were warm and well cared for. They'd be sadder if they were in the wild running around getting hurt with no nice vets and assistants to look after them and make them feel better, and maybe nothing to eat some days. They always got lots to eat here, see?

He accepted it when he was toddling around watching them through the glass. When he was older, he realized it wasn't always true, that some of them did look sad sometimes. When he was older still, he realized some of them looked sad all the time. And by the time his mom died and he knew what true sadness was, he realized all of them really were sad _all the time_.

He also noticed when he was little that there weren't any babies, just a few young ones that got older just as he did. Mom said they didn't let them make babies together because there were already too many of them. It would get too crowded and not be as nice for them in their little home. In the wild, though, she promised, there were lots of babies, and if they needed more animals for the zoo, they could capture more. They tried to capture as many as they could, anyway, to keep them safe, but it was hard to capture the littlest ones because their parents protected them really hard.

It took him years to understand that "protect them really hard" meant the wild parents sometimes killed their young rather than let them be captured.

_No wonder they look sad,_ he thought, forehead resting on the glass the first time he talked Dad into taking him to the zoo after Mom died.

He cried on the way home, tucking himself against the door with his cheek against the cool glass window. Dad wouldn't take him to the zoo for a long time after that.

Dad tried hard to do anything to make him feel better, but he'd always had to go to work while Mom brought her work with her, so Dad wasn't as good at knowing what would make him feel better. Mom brought her sketchpad with her everywhere they went. Her drawings and paintings of the zoo animals were sold in the local crafts fair and the zoo shop itself. Two paintings of a "matriarch" and a "patriarch" even hung in the town's museum. She'd taken him to see them and explained what the words meant. Those two animals had died before he was born, but he thought he could see a resemblance to them in some of the animals he'd grown up watching.

Mom encouraged him to draw them, too, on their outings, but he didn't have her talent. He enjoyed the feeling of the charcoal flowing on the thick paper, though, with the sun warming the back of his neck and making the habitat--that was another special word Mom taught him young--mysterious and beautiful with shadows bisecting the bright gleam of grass and trees, and the colorful house with its big, bare windows where you could watch the animals doing private things. Or things that would be private if they weren't animals, at least. But they were animals, so it was okay to watch them even if they all glared through the windows--all the windows, the ones in the sides of the house and the one that made up the big cage itself--at the watchers the whole time.

"The zoo is educational," his teachers said when they took them on outings in first grade, second grade, third grade. He liked going with Mom more, but the annual school trips were also fun, going with Scott and the rest of their class, with the clatter and the inevitable delays as somebody wandered off or urgently needed to go to the bathroom. When Mom was gone and Dad was reluctant to take him back to the zoo, the school outings were a combination of nostalgia and grief and happy memories rolled into one confusing whole.

Scott wanted to be a vet when he grew up. Scott didn't think the creatures were sad, but Scott was more intrigued by how the vets got to handle and look after them than by the animals themselves. He found that a bit weird about Scott, but he loved Scott, so that was okay. The two of them weren't exactly the same, but they always found common ground.

When he was twelve and on the school outing to the zoo, he realized the animals' sadness wasn't sadness at all. Or, yes, of course it was, in many them, but it wasn't _only_ sadness: In some of them, it was rage.

He saw the fire of hate ignited in the dark eyes of a creature that seemed just a little older than he was, what the zoo keepers and his teachers called a "juvenile". Not quite fully grown yet, but a few years closer to adulthood than he was. He met the creature's eyes and saw it: the narrowing of the eyes, the fiery hate. He couldn't seem to break their locked stare until suddenly he felt drenched in the horror of living life in a glass cage, never being able to go to school and run free or play or have a proper house, one without huge windows so everybody could watch all the time....

His eyes filled with tears as pain flooded him and he kept staring, frozen, unable to move: staring into those burning dark eyes until he thought they might burn him up. Then an adult female put a hand on the juvenile's shoulder and they turned away. Without those burning eyes pinning him to the spot like a butterfly pinned to a board, he gasped, then turned and ran from the viewing area. Ignoring his teacher's voice calling after him, he ran right through the big grounds and out of the zoo and all the way home, to safety, where he collapsed, trying to catch his breath, trying to keep his panic from drowning him. 

Dad came home half an hour later, called by the teacher, and just held him against his warm, safe body while he cried and cried.

"It's wrong," he gasped. It was all he could manage to say: "It's wrong. It's wrong."

Dad didn't ask him what he meant; maybe Dad just knew, or maybe he didn't think it mattered right then. Dad held him till he was all cried out, and made him a cup of hot chocolate, then lay with him on the couch till he fell asleep in the safest place in the world, in Dad's arms. In their safe house with curtains to cover the windows so nobody could stare in.

Later, he learned Dad told the school no more zoo outings for him. He wasn't sorry about that the next year when he got to stay in the library and read all the books he wanted instead of going with the others on the outing.

Scott didn't understand, which was its own brand of painful.

"They're safe," Scott said. "Maybe some of them hate being in a cage, but that's because they don't understand how dangerous it is in the wild. The zoo keeps them safe and healthy and well fed and warm."

"It's wrong." His throat caught on the words as always, and he couldn't ever say anything else.

Scott gave him a sad smile and a hug because even though Scott didn't understand, he was still his best friend and he loved him, just as he loved Scott even though Scott would probably never get what he was trying to say. He spent his early teen years safe in the security of his home, Dad's love, Scott's friendship, and his simple, unvarying routine.

When he turned sixteen, things changed. Or he changed: became a "little wild", as his teacher termed it on his report card. He still aced his classes and exams with less work than many of the others had to put in, which left him with a good deal of free time to read and think and ponder. And remember.

When he was sixteen and one week old, he returned to the zoo. His established after-school routine was that he always went either to the library alone or played lacrosse with Scott before it was time to head home, finish up his homework, and think of something healthy to give Dad for dinner. Tuesday was a library day. Instead, on that Tuesday, he went to the zoo, paid the entrance fee, and walked hesitantly down the concrete paths through the various habitats, bypassing the birds, the monkeys, the aquarium building. He looked around himself as he walked and felt a jolt at how familiar the place still was despite the years it'd been since he'd last visited.

His feet took him automatically to the glass enclosure. By the time he arrived, sweat was clammy on his skin, his Captain America T-shirt sticking to his back, and he was breathing through his mouth in an effort to keep the anxiety at bay. _Lock it in a glass enclosure,_ he thought with a hint of hysteria.

Then he was there, inside the narrow building with the strong, tempered glass between the ordinary world and the creatures' habitat. The building was lined with information sheets behind plastic protectors, but he knew what they all said. More to the point, the structure made the observation gallery a shadowed, secret place, allowing the viewers to be incognito while the creatures had no way of avoiding the eyes that might or might not at any time be watching them from that dark space.

He thought of the terror of never knowing if somebody were staring in the windows of your house, watching you whatever you might be doing, seeing you cry, seeing you hug, seeing you sick or angry or hurt or scared.

He shoved his hands in his pockets to try to still their shaking and stared into the large enclosure. The creatures were a family unit, as he knew from his eager study of them as a child. Five adults and six children. All the children had been caught in the wild; there weren't any new children because all the adults were sterilized: swallowing a lump in his throat, he remembered Mom telling him that tidbit, too, and wondered why the horror of it had never actually penetrated his awareness.

The youngsters he'd once watched would be older now. Some of them were probably adults. He remembered a female who'd looked about his size. He'd watched her avidly, though she never did much of interest. She didn't seem to have any toys and mostly stayed close to an adult female.

_Woman,_ he thought, bitter and cross with himself; not a "female," not a creature.

The enclosure, with its bushes and small garden and cute little house--no, not a house, which was a place of safety, but a structure, a mere shelter--with its big windows, glowed golden as a crisp, enticing apple in the late February light. He could see several of the creatures sitting on the logs outside their house, drinking from bowls. Sometimes they gestured to each other, which the info sheets said was their way of communicating. He took a step closer to the glass, edging out of the deepest shadows at the back of the gallery. The glass wasn't one-way, as he'd learned that day when the juvenile--the _boy_ \--had locked eyes with him. He might be seen if he went close to the glass.

From midway across the gallery, he stood motionless, watching, watching, a pain tearing deeper into his gut at every blink of his eyes. There they were, some of the last wolves in California safely contained:

_Men_ and _women_ and _boys_ and _girls_.

A pair of young men came out of the structure, both dark haired, one a few years older than the other. Both broad-shouldered, muscular, lithe and graceful with the coiled tension of a powerful spring made flesh. He took another step closer to the glass, feeling the pulse fluttering in his throat, and the younger of the two paused, then slowly turned his head.

He stepped right up to the glass, pulling his hands from his pockets. He felt tense as a drawn wire himself, stretched tight enough to snap, but he kept his eyes on that powerful figure as his eyes met those dark ones he'd never forgotten. Anger still lit the man's eyes from within, and he could read them clearly now: contempt, disgust, fury. Hate.

He swallowed and nodded his head slowly, holding those eyes with his own even as his vision blurred. He lifted his hands and ran the first two fingers of each hand down his cheeks from his eyes, pantomime crying even as a real tear rolled free. Then he laid his hand over his heart before closing it into a fist and moving it clockwise on his chest. He didn't know if they'd understand ASL, but he hoped the intent behind the gestures would reach the young man, not that much older than him, who'd grown up in a small glass prison.

The man stared for another long minute, then turned away and sat deliberately with his back turned.

He became aware then that the others in the family group were watching him. He repeated the "sorry" sign, then dropped his hand and left. Saying sorry didn't do a damned bit of good. The only good he could do them was not intrude into their sad lives with his creepy staring.

:::::::

Only it wasn't the only thing he could do, of course! Later, he'd lacerated himself for wasting six fucking weeks in inaction when, dammit, he could've got going with organizing the protests that much sooner. No point in wasting time in if-onlies, though, so he'd put that lapse behind him and focused on his campaign to protest the keeping of sentient werewolves in captivity.

Scott wasn't on his side in the fight, the first major rift between them. "We can't just set them free, Stiles! They're _dangerous_!"

"Right, that's why we cohabited with them for, like, I don't know, _centuries_ without any great massacres or other problems! Come on, Scott, stop just buying into the propaganda!"

Scott had just dug in deeper, stubborn as only Scott could be. "I'm going to study them and treat them so I can keep them safe." His voice was grim. "You'll just get them killed."

Scott wasn't with him, so he'd turned his attention to agitating other kids at school into caring, which is how he'd finally gotten the divine Lydia Martin to notice him. ( _Yes!_ ) She was, it turned out, opposed to zoos in general, not just to the keeping of werewolves in captivity, but she lent him the benefit of her massive brain and her cachet as Popular Girl. She also brought along her douchebag boyfriend, Jackson, but nothing was perfect and Danny came packaged with Jackson, so that was a win because Danny was a demon computer nerd.

Then two guys he'd only peripherally noticed before drifted into their little circle of protest, Erica and Boyd, both of whom were sort of ominously fixated on the wolves, but they provided muscle, which proved to be useful when their picket lines at the zoo attracted assholes who thought it was fun to prove human beings were the ones who really needed to be locked up.

An admittedly tiny band of intrepid protesters, but, hey, Greenpeace started out small, too, right? (He accidentally wrote a twenty-page treatise on the history of Greenpeace for Economics; sorry, Coach, it just happened. Again.)

He and Lydia designed posters, which he stuck up all over town. He became the king of sneak-poster-affixing. He wrote letters to the editor, one of which the local newspaper even published. Wider dissemination of their protest happened when a reporter came down to interview them on the picket line, which they threw up whenever they didn't have school, sports, or home duties.

Okay, yeah, it was a pathetic effort. At least they were trying. That wasn't much consolation, but it was _something_. It was taking too fucking long, but at least he could glimpse a far-off hope shining on the horizon more golden than the wolves' despicable cage. A goal worth working toward.

Then the Argents came to town.

Scott fell instantly for Allison, but it was her aunt Kate and grandfather Gerard who posed the most threat in Stiles' life. They were as ardently opposed to freeing the wolves as he was dedicated to making it happen, and the Argents were a damned sight more dangerous and violent than anybody he'd personally ever encountered before. They fucking _scared_ him with what they might be capable of doing to get their way.

He and his little band were in the first term of their junior year when the shit hit the fucking fan like an explosive charge. They'd kept up the pressure on city council by invading the town halls; kept their picket lines up at the entrance to the zoo in all seasons and weather; kept renewing the posters when they got tattered or were torn down around town. When the zoo got an injunction forcing them to stay away from the entrance, they simply moved their line to a safe distance. They were persistent little buggers, as Mrs. Hughes at the bakery cum coffee shop phrased it as she let Stiles openly tack a new poster to her community bulletin board, but they were winning over people. Far too slowly for his liking, but change was in the air as their cause slowly gained momentum.

The protests at the city council meetings had burgeoned with new recruits, ordinary people in the community who spoke up at last, maybe from shame long repressed; maybe because some of their kids or grandkids were getting involved. The picket lines at the zoo swelled--unless it was raining, of course, then it was just their core little group--to the point where sometimes a line went up without even one of them present to generate the interest and coordinate the chants. The local printer gave them a discount rate on their posters and leaflets, the latter of which they handed out at the mall and in the downtown area and more people volunteered to help with that effort, too.

All that hopefulness destroyed when Kate and Gerard spearheaded a counter-movement, agitating for greater security, maybe even for a new hunt to capture more of the "vicious creatures", make the area safer for innocent people who just wanted to go hiking without having to worry about having their throats ripped out. They produced their own posters with lurid images of dead animals savagely mutilated. They "reminded" a reporter in a new feature story about the famous Beacon Hills massacre, a tale even Danny couldn't find any verifiable evidence for, and if Danny couldn't find corroborating evidence, it didn't exist on the internet. They handed out their own leaflets, full of hate-mongering prejudice, and their counter picket lines were mostly thugs who liked to push, shove, and, if the chance arose, punch anybody in opposition.

But they were smooth talkers, have to give them that. Also adults, as opposed to a movement spearheaded by teenagers. The Argent family was in the security and protection business, highly respectable and established, another point to them.

He despaired, sometimes to the point of crying himself to sleep, thinking of those people locked in their transparent cage, of the kids growing up in that fishbowl. Of the hate in burning dark eyes that followed him into sleep night after night. He'd told them he was sorry, but that was nothing. He'd _meant_ to do something real to help them, not just give them empty sentiment. He'd felt they were getting closer to tipping public opinion against the caging of sentient humanoid beings, but the Argents changed everything.

Now the general public wasn't just apathetic about the issue, the way they'd been before he'd started the campaign, but were becoming increasingly convinced the Hales were actually dangerous.

Hales. He'd learned their names. The sign outside their cage said "The Hale Pack" and listed their names in order of age. He didn't know the name of the guy with the burning eyes who haunted his nightmares, but it didn't matter.

Dad let him alone to find his way, other than sitting him down and explaining the consequences of violating the restraining order.

"I know, Dad," he'd said, a lump in his throat making his voice hoarse. "We understand and we won't break the order. But we can't stop protesting, either."

"Son, I know this is important to you, but I don't think this is a fight you can win." Dad's voice had been gentle as a tissue wiping away his tears. "And you've got school--"

"It's wrong." His throat had closed up over the words and Dad had nodded, pulled him close and held him till he stopped shaking.

The Argents were wrong in the worst ways, evil, and people were dupes, more easily persuaded to fear than to care. He hated that, too, with a passion that shook him to his marrow, but he forcibly kept his focus on doing what he could to encourage folks around town to think of the Hales, of Talia, Peter, Laura--he'd memorized their names to personalize them, even though he didn't have faces to go with the names in his head--as _people_ , not creatures, not animals. People who were different from most of them, sure, but still _people_.

He still didn't understand, even as months passed and he got up-close knowledge of the ways ordinary people reacted, why such a simple, basic, human truth was so hard to make the general public care about. He'd have gotten himself tied up in knots about it, completely losing focus, if Lydia's cool-headed logic and Boyd's and Erica's down-to-earth pragmatism hadn't kept him grounded.

So he continued doggedly fighting the good fight with the small tools he had and fell asleep every night with a pair of burning eyes drilling into him in the dark and hoping--simply refusing to quit hoping from sheer obstinacy--that one day he'd live in a world where people keeping other people captive like goldfish to stare at and ooh over was abolished. A world where a majority of his fellow citizens agreed it was fundamentally abhorrent to treat people who were different like animals.

Then it happened, an ordinary school day with lacrosse practice afterwards. He'd consider ducking out, but Coach had glared at him, so he'd sighed and put on the uniform and gone to sit on the bench, the way he did for most of each game. He'd been cheering Scott on in an inept shot at the goal when Lydia sat down behind him.

"I've been talking to Allison," she said without greeting. "I think something's up."

"Up?"

"Mmm. She said Kate and Gerard have been talking in low voices with her parents, but going quiet if she enters the room. Her parents have been arguing, too. I think her mother is more on Kate and Gerard's side than her father is. Anyway, she was curious, so she did a bit of eavesdropping, as you do--"

He grinned.

"--and she thinks they're heading to the zoo tonight for some reason or other."

His grin vanished as his stomach sank. "Oh, my god."

"Yeah. I can't think of any good reason why the Argents and their thugs would be going to the zoo after it's closed."

"Crap, Lydia!" He took a deep, shaky breath. "Crap, crap, crap. Okay, okay, we need to get the guys together."

"Right. I'll talk to Jackson and Danny. Allison didn't catch a time, though. The zoo closes at 8 in the winter, so all we know is it'll be sometime after that. I mean, if something is actually going to happen at all."

"We'll have to try to set up watches. Skype at, say, 5?"

After Lydia left, he did his best to curb his impatience till the game was over, then snagged Boyd for a whispered conversation on the way out of the locker room. When he logged into Skype at 5, each of the others joined him within minutes and they set up a watch schedule based on when each of them was best able to get out of the house without drawing their parents' attention. Lydia and Jackson took the 8 pm slot, followed by Erica at 9, Danny at 10, Boyd at 11, and Stiles took the midnight slot, when Dad would be fast asleep. If nothing happened by then, Jackson grudgingly said he could do 1 am, and they'd take it from there.

As soon as they finished, he put his phone on charge, as each of the others would be doing, too. Phones charged and kept at hand. If the Argents showed up, the plan was to call the Sheriff's office instantly and alert each other. They didn't have a snowball's chance of stopping Kate or Gerard of any of their muscled goons by themselves, but maybe they could throw a spanner into whatever nasty plan was afoot just by being vigilant.

Maybe. He limped through the evening, doing his best to pretend everything was normal while he was with Dad, then broodingly staring at the wall, chewing on the end of a well-bitten pen, when he retreated to his room. He wished he could alert Dad to the possibility of the Argents causing trouble, but he was pretty sure Dad would want proof, and he couldn't give Allison as a source because Allison would never betray her family to the authorities. She'd just lie and Dad would sigh and say there wasn't anything he could do without some reason to act. So no point in trying that tactic. It just would've been nice to have a patrol car sitting guard rather than just them.

When he left the house at 11.45, Dad was deeply asleep. He hurried to the zoo, where Boyd handed off a dark blanket Lydia had had the foresight to bring. "Quiet as the--"

"Don't say it! Ack!" Stiles hissed.

"I was gonna say mouse." Boyd's teeth gleamed in the dark for a moment, then he left with a pat to Stiles' shoulder.

He wrapped himself in the blanket, gripped his phone in one hand and the thermos of coffee he'd made in the other, and settled down to wait. The zoo was a large space, with twenty-two exhibits besides the wolves. It had only one public entrance, but there was an employees' private entrance around the side, which was closer to the wolves' enclosure at the back of the zoo and darker, not visible from the street. They'd decided that was their best place to keep watch. Small chance the Argents would sashay right in the well-lit main entrance.

Three quarters of an hour later, he shot to his feet at the sound of a muffled explosive charge on the other side of the zoo, realizing belatedly all in a panic that the side entrance was also far too fucking obvious! Plus a good bit farther from the wolves' cage than the perimeter fence a few feet beyond the back of the glass enclosure.

"Crap." He fumbled for his phone, punched in 911, then set off at a run as he told the dispatcher about hearing an explosion at the back of the zoo. He ended the call without giving his name, then quickly keyed in a brief message to each of the others, unsure, now that it was actually happening in the dead darkness of a cold, clear night, what exactly any of them could do. Fucking explosives! And who knew what other weapons the Argents had armed themselves with, or what their actual plan was. Allison had shown Scott her father's weapons room, used in his "security business," if that was even the truth of what he did. Point being: the Argents had a shit-ton of really fucking deadly weaponry at their disposal.

An alarm was wailing, loud and dissonant, getting under his skin like ants and making it crawl.

He should go home. He should call Dad. He didn't have a chance of stopping even one of the Argents, weapons or not, never mind a bunch of them.

But he couldn't make himself stop running. He had to _see_ what was happening, even if he couldn't do anything.

As he rounded the far corner and raced as fast as he could up the small hilly area beyond the outer fence, a preternatural howl set his pulse leaping. He skittered to a stop at the sight of flames rising from inside the compound, lighting the darkness and glinting on the shattered glass of the wolves' cage. According to the brochures he'd avidly read when younger, the glass was strong enough to withstand attacks by the wolves themselves, and even bullets. Apparently well-placed dynamite, however, could utterly shatter it. The Argents had cut through the outer fence--he could see the ragged hole they'd cut--then used the dynamite inside.

Mixed with the howls was screaming as flames leaped high, but they cut off abruptly at the sound of bullets. The howling grew louder, mixed with snarls and yells.

He'd never felt as helpless in his life.

Then movement caught his eye and his eyes caught on two figures who ran out of the flames, then paused, looking around. The Argents had left one of their goons at the hole in the fence and he turned to face them, lifting his gun. Without a thought, Stiles scrabbled for the only weapon he had, rocks, and flung them as hard and fast as he could. One of them miraculously hit the asshole smack in the back, and Stiles followed with a whole handful of gravel that impacted the back of the guy's head. Not enough to do any damage, but it distracted him so he turned.

"This way!" Stiles yelled, waving both his hands over his head frantically at the two wolves who were crouched between their burning home and the armed guard.

He wasn't sure if they'd be able to see him, so he was reaching for his phone to flick on the flashlight app, but both their heads lifted at his yell and they seemed to see him just fine, standing a few feet above them in darkness. ( _Superior eyesight to humans_ : Right, he remembered that.) With the guard turning away, his weapon lifted but no longer aimed at them, they rushed forward, knocked him flat, and ran through the gap in the fence. Stiles ran a few more feet up the hill to its crest, leading them, and they joined him in seconds.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," he babbled, trying to catch his breath. He pointed with the phone in his hand. "Go that way, you'll get to a road and the Preserve's beyond it."

He gestured again, because they weren't supposed to understand language, according to his teachers and the general info, and he just wasn't sure even though he doubted it.

The pair stared at him. Both of them were taller than him and seemed young, best he could see in the darkness, no more than a handful of years older than he was. Brother and sister, he figured; they were all related and these two would've been children when they were captured. Their eyes were neon blue in the dark, eerie and disturbing, but the woman suddenly cried out and doubled over, grabbing her brother's arm. He held her up without shifting his burning eyes from Stiles. Those eyes...not dark now, but utterly familiar, anyway. Stiles lifted his fist and made the "sorry" sign on his chest, too choked to say anything else. The razor gaze followed his hand down to look, then snapped back up to his face.

The woman lifted her head and her eyes were no longer blue, but red. _Alpha!_ Oh, crap. That only happened if the former alpha was dead, right? Both of the Hales turned to look down to the fire.

"You have to go! Run now before that guy gets up or the Argents come out!" He accompanied the urgent words with a forceful gesture.

It'd all been just seconds since they'd knocked down the guard and run to join him, but it felt like a frighteningly long and dangerous delay.

The woman spoke in a crisp voice: "Yes, we're leaving. You go home, kid, right now. Don't let them see you." She gave him a gentle shove back the way he'd come, then shoved her brother a lot harder and they both sprinted up the hill and disappeared over its top.

Shaking with fear and horror, he turned and scrambled as fast as he could back down the path. He flung a final look at the crumpled guard on the ground--crap, he hoped the guy wasn't dead, but admittedly only because that could bring more trouble on the escaped Hales--then shot around the corner of the zoo and took off through the shadowed park away from the firetruck and patrol car pulling up out front, filling the street with their sirens and strobing lights.

He jogged home through quiet residential streets, the long way. Once safely home, he locked the doors and went quietly up to his bedroom, pausing in the hallway to make sure Dad was safe and still asleep. Feeling chilled to the bone, he pulled on a jacket before getting into bed, where, with shaky hands, he sent a message to his friends telling them it was over, to stay away. Then he lay awake staring at the ceiling for hours.

The next day, the whole town was sober with the news: eight wolves burned to death trapped in their "habitat"; one wolf rescued alive, but in a coma and hideously burned, not expected to wake up again; and two wolves missing. Gerard Argent offered his people for a hunt for the two fugitives, but they came back empty-handed.

:::::::

Three months later, he received a postcard in the mail. The front featured a picture of the Staten Island ferry in all its orange glory. On the back were just two words that had been cut from a magazine and taped on: Thank you.

He laughed for the first time in weeks, feeling a weight lift from his chest, and slipped the card into hiding in a book.

###### Epilogue

Eighteen months later, matters had changed more than he'd ever dared hope. The deliberate murder of a family of wolves in little, remote Beacon Hills made news, but was just a flash in the pan in the outside world. It did lead the town council to prohibit the zoo from holding werewolves captive, though, so that was a triumph!

But it was a small act in the much larger context of California's becoming the second state, after New York, to prohibit the capture and killing of werewolves and granting them full status as human beings and citizens. The protest movement he'd begun was only a sliver of a massive agitation throughout the state that had been growing by leaps and bounds, particularly since New York's governor had declared its landmark new law as a precedent.

Nobody was allowed to hunt or kill werewolves anymore, either, at least in the state of California. If a werewolf were suspected of a crime, that person would be captured and tried like any other citizen.

The Argents were fucking out of the hunter business, at least legally! And if they went vigilante, they could be tried and locked up, too. It was a small compensation for the loss of eight lives, but he did get satisfaction out of seeing Kate's smug look immediately after the fire contort over the following months into rage. Once California's new law was enacted, she and Gerard and their goons left town for good, moving to a state where they still had free rein to hunt and kill--at least for now. More states were talking about changing the law. The protesters were on a freaking roll.

Life went back to normal for all of them.

Till the day he and Scott were looking for Scott's inhaler in the Preserve and a black-haired, scowling guy confronted them. Stiles looked into familiar dark, angry eyes, his mouth dropped open, and he wondered how the hell he'd never before noticed just how fucking gorgeous Derek Hale was....

And so opened the startling next chapter in his life.


End file.
